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Another Rant: The Bane of My Existence!
There's a name that makes every web designer shudder at the mere mention of, and that's Internet Explorer. With good reason too. Internet Explorer has got to be the absolute worst internet browser ever created, especially for anyone who does web programming on just about any level.
Microsoft has a long track record of creating sub-par products, but one thing that can be said in their defense is that they eventually get it "right". Internet Explorer seems to be the exception.
Depending on what you know about web design, and programming you may or may not know that pretty much all things relating to specifications, guidelines, software, and tools on the web is overseen by a group called the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C for short). They identify standards and practices in an effort to ensure that the code that is used to make what you see on most websites happen, is the same on all computers. Sometimes these changes may be as simple as changing out an older tag for a newer one to make the coding process a bit more streamlined. Other times it's introducing new languages in order to give designs and developers alike more flexibility than they were used to.
Now with change there's always sure to be a few issues from time to time, that's to be expected. I've been doing web design/programming for quite some time now, and have encountered my fair share of headaches and problems. Sometimes the cause for those headaches are my fault, an unclosed tag here, an extra bracket there. But when problems pop up and it's not my fault ... but not only that, I've done everything correctly and it's not working because of a piece of crap program not following simple rules thus making my job that much harder, then that's where the frustration sets in.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer does exactly that. They just flat out don't care about what the W3C says, they do what they want. It's like I'm designing 2 websites half the time, one for IE and another for everything else. It's absolutely infuriating, because this piece of crap web browser is what most of my clients and their customers are using to view the webpage. Some browsers are very picky in terms of how they read code. They may require the syntax to be in a certain format, or even case-sensitivity, in order for it to work correctly, and that's fine. Most browsers are little more lenient, if you put in a line of code in a slightly less than perfect format it wont fault you for that, it knows what you're trying to do and it works fine. IE (which from this point will be called POCB short for Piece Of Crap Browser) does neither, in-fact POCB just picks and chooses what it will and wont work with, there are tags specifically created for POCB that don't work with any other browser out there. So when you're coding a site you have to include 2 different tags that do the exact same thing just so that what you get in POCB is what you see in every other browser out there. What type of sense does that make?
There's nothing more frustrating than working so hard to create a great looking site, and you use all the standardized code that should ensure that your site looks the same on all computers, only to look at it on POCB 6 (I will admit POCB 7 has finally gotten a bit better, but it's too little too late), and realize that your beautiful work looks like someone just digitally vomited all of your screen. Then you go and start modifying tags and code to work with POCB, and you finally get it looking good on POCB 6, you're relieved, and then you look at it in a real browser and, much to your chagrin, you see that the modifications for POCB now conflict with the standardized code causing your site not to work correctly. So now you have to go and create a separate set of code, that is only used when someone is using POCB, essentially doubling your work. It's like pulling teeth.
This is why standards are in place, so that developers can trust that what they do, is going to be accessible to everyone. You shouldn't have to cheat the system, or make workarounds just so that you can get your site to work everywhere.
Microsoft probably did this because they have an agreement with all the hospitals in North America and other parts of the world, guaranteeing that the associated hospital will receive a certain number of new patients with concussions, head wounds and trauma due to the fact that they are repeatedly bashing their head on the desk after trying to get code to work correctly in POCB. Whatever!
P.S. Things I'd rather do, than use POCB 6: Listen to Soulja Boy; watch Gigli; use iCab (which is also a bad browser, but at least it's supposed to suck); go to a Hillary Duff concert (hmm, I might be lying there); watch American Idol ... after the first 3 episodes, yeah it's that bad; talk to Paris Hilton for an extended period of time; I might even consider watching MadTV.
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